I was struck a couple weeks ago by a fairly banal headline amid the Trump administration’s daily authoritarian grease fires: “The Best Red Carpet Looks at the Venice Film Festival.” With the fracturing of democracy, I’d forgotten that mainstream entertainment media and luxury brands are still doing their thing according to a seasonal calendar. The annual parade of Venice gowns whets the appetite for Fashion Weeks in New York, Paris, London, and Milan.

Fashion Week ought to be a reminder that despite world wars and natural disasters, the cycles of institutional culture and the media that promote them always manage to carry on. Haute couture is the small-batch distraction from social ills just like professional sports is (or is supposed to be) the Big Gulp distraction. But the first thing I saw in the New York Times about the city’s 2025 Fashion Week was an article on Andrew Cuomo and other current and former local politicians walking the runway as part of Style Across the Aisle, a supposedly bipartisan charity event launched by a former journalist who “last year wore an ‘I Heart Cuomo’ T-shirt in the Hamptons.”

If that reporting by the Times did anything, it showed that both the paper and the society world that would vote for Cuomo—a Democrat who had sought Donald Trump’s help in his mayoral campaign—do not inhabit the real world of this city at this time. Cuomo modeled a suit designed by Gina Newman of Bond and Bari one day after both the murder of Charlie Kirk and Trump’s response to it—which was to declare that he “couldn’t care less” about mending the seething political divide. The Utah police hadn’t even named a suspect, but Trump went on Fox News to blame all Democrats as “radicals on the left,” calling them “vicious” and “horrible.”

The press—and the media conglomerates and/or wealthy families who own it—can’t seem to stop failing us. The Trump regime has so far extorted millions from CBS and ABC and brought frivolous lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Leaving aside the functioning of every other non-governmental institution in the wake of Trump, what has happened to the Fourth Estate might be the greatest tragedy of our time.

“Republicans aren’t going to save us,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) recently said of Trump’s assaults. “The mainstream media isn’t going to save us. The Supreme Court isn’t going to save us. We will not stop Trump from destroying our democracy through de-escalatory politics. We need to fight fire with fire.”

But why has the press—and especially the Times and the Washington Post—failed so spectacularly? The great irony of the current mainstream media is that it’s the news reporters and analysts (or their editors and publishers) who are being manipulated by the Trump regime and failing to call out unconstitutional abuses when seen or heard. The list of Trump’s transgressions they have failed to target since January is almost too long to run through.

• Why do they let him chronically lie about immigrants, crime, tariffs, inflation, prices, and unemployment?
• When he proposes authoritarian actions that are blatantly unconstitutional, why can’t they address it then and there?
• Why don’t they call out his rambling nonsense talk, his distorted language and incoherence, and his obvious memory lapses?
• Why don’t they ask about the obvious health problems—his swollen ankles, the terrible bruises on the backs of both hands, his drooping mouth?
• Why can’t any of them counter his claims that wind and solar energy are useless because it’s not always windy and the sun sets by mentioning batteries?
• Why do they let him get away with saying he is decreasing prescription drug prices by 1400% and that 300 million people died from drug use last year?

The press initially covered the FBI’s announcement that there was nothing to see within the Epstein files as a MAGA rift story, not as a coverup of Trump’s possible complicity, and now they’ve dutifully scrubbed it from their notebooks.

I’m not sure how much of this failing owes to fear of losing access to the inner sanctum—either by individuals or their bosses—but even within a White House press pool that the Trump administration has diluted with its propaganda chuds, reporters seem to want to slip away to the authoritarian right, as if this was some kind of unrequited yearning.

The halfway decent among them seem to have taken the Chuck Schumer pill that says that the hands of justice and constitutionality are tied, so when Trump commits impeachable offenses like telling his Attorney General to bring charges against his enemies—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James—and says that George Soros should be imprisoned, they can only shrug.

Among the many failures of the Times is its strange rhetorical tamping down of the regime’s extreme behaviors while adding a genteel varnish of false equivalence. In almost every piece about the administration, upset commenters will write “Why aren’t you talking about X, Y, and Z?” Peter Baker will eventually write an analysis piece in which he makes a few veiled references to X, Y, and Z—everything that’s obvious to a sentient human being—but that’s the maddening extent of it.

Then there’s the columnist Ezra Klein, whom you really can’t lump in with the journalists since he’s a branded personality. On September 7, Klein finally acknowledged that the Democrats must “Stop Acting like This Is Normal” and shut down the government in protest of Trump’s power grabs. But then four days later, after Charlie Kirk’s murder, he pens the shamefully apologist column “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” The revolt among his commenting readers was the strongest I’ve ever witnessed in the Times. Nevertheless, he doubled down on his Kumbaya moment with white Christian nationalism in a podcast with Ross Douthat. Why on earth would Klein make himself a dupe of right-wing propaganda? I can’t help thinking it’s all some teachable moment for his cherished upper-middle-class children—that he knows he’s preaching to the choir in text so he might as well use this coveted gig in a personally beneficial capacity.

Klein makes me wonder if we’ve hit this point all across our society, where it’s every flack for himself, the self-promotion of individual careers over a community of journalists. It’s true that very few people in ANY traditionally liberal institution are willing to risk their own paychecks for democratic principles. But the press can’t even stand up for one another. No one supported AP when they were kicked out of the press pool for refusing to accede to “Gulf of America.” They didn’t squawk about Trump’s verbal insults to NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor or ABC’s Jon Karl. They didn’t protest ABC’s firing of reporter Terry Moran or MSNBC’s firing of political analyst Matthew Dowd.

To be apprised of what the Trump administration is doing to our democracy, you need to exit mainstream media for smaller publications or independent commentators online—what some call the Fifth Estate. Or you can stay on mainstream media but go with the comedians—the late-night hosts and the writers behind South Park—who happen to be the only mainstream folks calling out the regime’s abuses.

A week after Kirk’s murder, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission came for Jimmy Kimmel via ABC, with FCC chairman Brendan Carr pressuring the network over a statement by Kimmel that the right considered disrespectful of Kirk. We know that both Hitler and Putin went for the comedians first, and Trump has not bucked that trend. “Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else,” Trump said at a press conference while visiting the U.K. “They should’ve fired him a long time ago. So you can call that free speech or not.”

As always with Trump, there is a fleck of “truth” woven into his lies. The familiar formats of network and cable television entertainment can no longer compete with spontaneous novelty like the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. Scott Galloway, the monotone-speaking business school prof who’s cueball head is all over YouTube, told Kara Swisher on their podcast that network and cable news and talk shows don’t realize that they’re dead. He sees a future where Stephen Colbert and the other hosts will be doing podcasts with a staff of nine—pretty grim for the hundreds that currently work on those shows. And yet given how late-night clips permeate TikTok, YouTube, and social media, the true reach of this content is difficult to tabulate. (The quants have little to say about that.)

Through generations of merger and acquisitions, we’ve lamented the concentration of power within the hands of evil overlords, which now come to us in the form of Disney, Paramount Skydance, and Warner Brothers Discovery. The internet has drastically changed the legacy media landscape; that is the reality on which we have the overlay of Trump’s authoritarian regime.

On his September 21 show, John Oliver said this: “If we’ve learned nothing else from this administration’s second term so far—and I don’t think we have—it is that giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time. They are never going to stop. They literally said that openly.” He appealed to the cowardly Bob Iger to be a better man. And Iger did come round, presumably because of pressure from customers canceling Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions. But about a quarter of the ABC stations in the United States won’t be airing Kimmel’s show.

I suppose you could add to Senator Murphy’s above-cited list that “the comedians aren’t going to save us.” In the same episode of The Daily Show where Jon Stewart expressed outrage at Colbert’s cancellation by CBS, his guest was Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times who prevented the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024, accused his own newspaper of leftist editorial bias, and unsuccessfully sought a position in the Trump administration. Stewart’s questions to him were all pretty lame.

But for the moment at least, the American comedian corps is one up on the American press corps. I was recently thinking about John Mulaney’s renowned bit about “a horse loose in a hospital!” I realize that this routine from Trump 1 doesn’t just explain our chronic anxiety about the man’s demented leadership. It actually explains why comedians have a vocational compulsion to continually talk about him. And that’s because Trump is absurd, not just in himself but in every action he takes. The voters chose this absurdity twice, but comedians can’t acclimate to passivity. Fortunately for us, they’re jolted to action by the feel of something gnawing at their soul. Unfortunately for us, our mainstream reporters are already the walking dead. §